Our UbiComp 2008 paper entitled "Flowers or a Robot Army?: Encouraging Awareness & Activity with Personal, Mobile Displays" was just honored with a 10-Year Impact Award at the UbiComp 2018 conference. Congratulations to my co-authors!
It was a tremendous privilege (and humbling experience) working at Intel Research in the mid-2000s. I benefited tremendously from the mentorship of Mike Y. Chen, Ian Smith, and particularly Sunny Consolvo and James Landay.[read more]

Excited to announce that FabGalaxy, a new online interactive visualization tool for searching fabrication research in HCI and Graphics, is live under Personal Fabrication Research in HCI and Graphics: An Overview of Related Work.
Thank you to the support from HCI Engineering Group, MIT CSAIL, which is led by Prof. Stefanie Mueller.[read more]

Please join me in congratulating Drs. Matt Mauriello and Lee Stearns who successfully passed their PhD defenses today. One of the true joys of being a professor is seeing students develop into independent scholars like Matt and Lee. Matt is now off to a post-doc at Stanford and Lee will join APL at Johns Hopkins.
Thanks to the fantastic committee members as well who spanned from multiple disciplines, universities, and parts of the US! :)
Matt's dissertation is entitled "
Designing and Evaluating Next-generation Thermographic Systems to Support Residential Energy Audits" and available for download here and Lee's dissertation is entitled "Handsight: A Touch-based Wearable System to Increase Information Accessibility for People With Visual Impairments" and available here.[read more]

Our $1.2m NSF grant on "Wearable Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Persons who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing" was just officially awarded. This is research started by Dhruv Jain, Leah Findlater, and Jon Froehlich in the summer of 2014 when Dhruv was between ugrad and MIT. Dhruv is now a PhD student in the Allen School and a member of the Makeability Lab.
The award officially starts Aug 1, 2018 and runs through July 31, 2022. Leah Findlater is the PI along with Co-PIs Froehlich (UW), Ramani Duraiswami (UMD), and Raja Kushalnagar (Gallaudet University).
This is the third award for this work following the initial two (a Google Faculty Award and the recent UW Reality Lab funding)--both which helped provide seed funding for the NSF effort.[read more]

We’re going to Galway, Ireland! The Makeability Lab has two full papers and three posters at ASSETS’18.
UMD PhD student Lee Stearns led a project entitled Design of an Augmented Reality Magnification Aid for Low Vision Users and explores augmented reality solutions for magnifying text for low-vision users. Lee also had a poster paper accepted entitled Applying Transfer Learning to Recognize Clothing Patterns Using a Finger-Mounted Camera. Both projects are in collaboration with UW HCDE professor Leah Findlater.
UW CSE PhD student Dhruv Jain led a project entitled Towards Accessible Conversations in a Mobile Context for People Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing and examines real-time captioning solutions for people who are DHH and on-the-move. This work is a collaboration among UW CSE (Dhruv Jain, Jon Froehlich), UW HCDE (Rachel Franz, Leah Findlater) and Gallaudet University in DC (Raja Kushalnagar).
The Project Sidewalk team also got two posters in: A Feasibility Study of Using Google Street View and Computer Vision to Track the Evolution of Urban Accessibility , which was based on Ladan Najafizdeh's MS thesis work and Interactively Modeling and Visualizing Neighborhood Accessibility at Scale: An Initial Study of Washington DC , which was led by undergrad extraordinaire Anthony Li along with Manaswi Saha).[read more]

Makeability lab member Dhruv Jain receives travel award from UW Paul G Allen School of Computer Science to attend Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in September 2018.
The Tapia conference is the premier venue to acknowledge, promote and celebrate diversity in computing. Congratulations Dhruv![read more]

We’re so excited to be here for the summer! This is a great opportunity for all of us to gain new experience, collaborate with others on projects, and learn more about impactful research in human-computer interaction.
Here’s a little more about us:
Aileen: Hello! I’m going to be a rising sophomore studying computer science at University of Washington. I’m working part-time on the Makeability Lab website and on Project Sidewalk with Mikey. Being part of the Makeability Lab has been such a inspiring, fun, and eye-opening experience. Outside of lab, I also like to run, bike, and jump into lakes.
Angela: Hi everyone! I’m Angela, a rising Freshman at UPenn pursuing a dual degree in business and engineering. I’m currently working on a project developing ambient sound sensing and awareness for deaf and hard of hearing individuals with Dhruv Jain. In addition to being a big film and tech enthusiast, I enjoy spending time outdoors, running, and playing the piano!
Johnson:
Shiven: Hey, I’m Shiven, a rising senior at Redmond High. Currently working on the Makelab website. Working in the lab is awesome - I learned a lot. In my free time, I like to play the piano.
Sonika: Hey there! I’m a rising senior at Tesla STEM High School, currently working on a project in assistive technology. I’ve always been interested in computer science, and being an intern at the lab has taught me so much. In my spare time, I love to listen to music, write poetry, and bike on scenic trails. [read more]

Mikey Saugstad graduated from the University of Maryland with a Masters in Computer Science, moved to San Diego, and began remotely working in the Makeability Lab full time as a research scientist.
We'll miss seeing you in person Mikey![read more]